Gay 'marriage'
 

today the front page of the metro showed a gay english couple getting 'married' yesterday a scottish couple and the day before and irish couple.

i am very much in favour of people getting all rights etc that go with this civil partnership lark, i think the same rights should be available for sisters or friends living together long term but i do wish they would stop using the word marriage to describe it.

my question is ... do you think it is to make gay couples seem more acceptable and legitimate (is we/they are married more paletable than we/they have a civil partnership agreement) or is it a media spin to make the legal document more understandable to the general public (call it something that it is similar too for ease of recognition)? or both?

anyway it pisses me off

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

Why do you believe hetrosexual couples should enjoy a monopoly on the term 'marriage'? In any case, why does it matter?

edit : I was ambiguous about the whole thing, but I was reading the paper this morning and found all the coverage quite pleasing. If nothing else, it'll piss off a whole bunch of homophobic ****s out there. Which can only be a good thing.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

why?

you'd prefer a Polish situation?

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

Well what would you say is marriage? Does it need a religious component? Does it have to be between a man and a woman? Am I still 'married' if I have a heterosexual secular service in a registry office?

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

all seems a bit of a fuss, tbh.

out of curiosity, can a hetrosexual couple have a civil partnership if they so wish? ie, is this gay marriage thing any different to what hetrosexuals get at a registry office?

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

There are a few things that all cultures have in common. One them is the existence of marriage. However, Anthropologists can only create vague definitions for it, because it appears in so many different forms.

In some cultures in Africa, you can only own property if you have a wife. If a woman wants to own property, she has to marry another woman. I believe she can do this even she is already married to a husband. This usually only happens when the husband dies and the woman wants to own the property her husband left behind.

In the highlands of Tibet and surrounding regions there is a shortage of arable land. When a land owning family has several sons this becomes a problem, because there isn't enough land to devide among all the sons and it's not as if the other sons will find any unused land of their own if only the eldest receives the land. Their solution is Polyandry. In Tibet a woman will marry a group of brothers that can range in ages by decades.

In other words, madi, calling the union of homosexual couples 'marriage' is nothing new nor is it sinister.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

i dont think it is sinister, but it is an incorrect name for the agreement.

the media description includes a pair of ' which is why i did in my title, as the union is actually a civil partnership agreement. the agreement doesnt need to be witnessed in public, there is no marriage licence or wedding.

and it pisses me off because i dislike the misrepresentation of things.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

gay people can't get married but there's something vry close to it which serves the same purpose. who gives a shit if they call a spade a spade?

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

I doubt this will a causal impact on how people view gays, but the fact that this law has been passed with very little controversy does imply that gay peoples are becoming more and more accepted (compare to America). View it is being a symptom of a deeper social trend rather than something thats likely to have a direct affect on attitudes.

Theres nothing to stop a gay couple having a big wedding at church with a cake and dancing if they can find a church thats prepared to marry them. Anyway, theres no legal requirement that m-f couples get married in public either - you can have registry office 'weddings' (I've been to one I think).



edit: can I use the word symptom in a value-neutral way or does it always imply the thing is a disease? :confused:

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

There are lots of misrepresentations in the media every day, I doubt you get pissed off about most of them.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

I'd say it usually has a negative connotation but given the context of your overall post it's all OK and you won't be reported to Peter Tatchell for re-education.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

actually i do, and tend not to read or watch the news too much because it is so annoying

i spend a lot of time pissed off

(and a registry office is public, with a public notice being posted so that objections can be made, i know as i had one)

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

My (implied) point was that you're thread was pretty specific and I don't recall seeing many other threads you've made about how the media misrepresented punk rock or whatever.

I realise you're probably not, but it's easy to read threads like this as homophobic, by implication. I seem to remember a similar thread where people like Deffeh said marriage was a Christian institution but wasn't particularly forthcoming as to where that monopoly stemmed from.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

This picture made me laugh.
Grumpy old gits.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

I've seen it argued that Christmas is still technically a Christian holiday even though a lot of people celebrate it for purely secular reasons. So there's no obvious reason why you couldnt say the same about marriage. Anyway, the things most people associate with marriage do generally tend to involve religious things such as church, and the specific practices have generally emerged out of the Christian tradition throughout our history. Also, you cant ignore the role that Judeo-Christianity has played in shaping our attitudes towards monogamous relationships in general.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

When the spade is infact a trowel.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

Except marriage isn't a peculiarly Christian institution, whereas Christmas (sort of) is.

Sure the specific type of marriage we might have enshrined into tradition in this country might be considered a Judeo-Christian "version" but then the whole argument becomes a bit tautological.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

I think its all for older people (in general, there are always exceptions).

I find most people I know under about 35 really just dont care.
It tends to be older people that ahve a view on it.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

It annoys me, but only because I'm a pedant. If they had passed a law creating/allowing (depending on which way you look at it) gay marriage, I'd be quite happy to call it that (and the gay marriages in some other countries obviously are marriages), but they didn't, it's not, and I wish the media would stop being wrong about everything all the time.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

These won't be called marriage either, just some word that translates loosely into marriage. But anyway: are there marriages not involving women at all?

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

typical lawyer: "something can only exist if its on the statute"

:rolleyes:

edit: hey, at least you arent a mathematician though! :win:

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

Because marriage is older than Christianity? Because marriage exists in non-Christian cultures?

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

That's kind of ethnocentric.
I don't remember any from my studies, but I guess they exist now though. Well, there are cultures such as certain Native Americans and Polynesians that had 3 sexes. The third sex were men who took on a feminine role, a third role - I don't think they were considered women, and it may be the case that other men married them, although I'm not sure.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

Christmas is older than christianity, and exists in non-Christan cultures.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

Is it older? Does it exist in every culture? Is this really a fair comparison?

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

This is the problem of defining our words before we start. Certainly to me that sentence is complete gibberish unless there's an actual genetic difference between the third sex and male/female.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

replace the 'had' with 'recognised' and it's fine.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

Christmas has very little to do with the birth of Christ. It's an appropriation of earlier pagan festivals. Whether it's a fair comparison or not is irrelevent, because either way it wouldn't support what you appeared to be trying to argue.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

Yeah but then I'd be like well that's cos they woz blind and daft innit?










science :mad:

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

Marriage is a worldwide phenomenon that non-christian people outside of the western hemisphere don't identify as being Christian. Almost every culture, even non-Christian ones, understand that Christmas is largely celebrated by Christians. Those people more than likely do not feel a sense of owning 'Christmas' but I'm sure that they do feel that their version of marriage is theirs and not a Christian one. It's not a fair comparison.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

I'm sorry I should have used the word 'gender.' Anyhow, even biological sex is a continuum with two destinct opposites, not a destinct set of only two categories that every human being falls in, it's possible to create a third category for people who fall into the middle of the continuum and have sexual traits of each extreme. It's not as rare as you may think.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

You don't seem to see how neutral, valueless objectivity is impossible.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

Marriage is a name given to any recognised interaction between people. It may not take place in the same way in other cultures, it definitely doesn't have to follow the same ceremony or the same rules. Given that you have to include "things that happen in other cultures which are kind of the same" in the term "marriage" for your statements in this thread to be self consistent, it's only consistent to consider that fertility festivals, approprirated or not, are by the same justification equivilent to christmas.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

You don't see how words like "sex" have an actual definition.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

...written into the fabric of space and time no doubt. Paradigm shifts lead to revaluation of core assumptions, perhaps if most 'scientists' were capable of escaping their Victorian value system they would see a very diverse world not shaped by definitive laws and rules, but just by people and their culturally constructed perspectives.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

Why shouldn't mentally ill people be able to 'marry'?

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

I think homophobes are mentally ill.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

Japiosiaf hpoigapd klhs ghga khbsp vn lkhagph lkmhnvclak vkjch ajh.

You know the significant difference between that and what I'm writing now? What I'm writing now obeys a consistent set of rules and has a number of configurations of known meaning. These are called grammar and vocabulary. It's these things that mean when I say "dog" you know I'm probably referring to a quadrupedal woofing thing. Of course, this differs with context, but that's one of the subtleties of language. Grammar is something that lets me communicate to you the interactions between these abstract representations of concepts. If you want to ignore these wonderful tools of communication, fine. Go back to the tried and true methods of gesturing at things and trying to eat them.

I occasionally wonder what phrase would have risen to such a height of popularity amongst people writing meaningless babble had Kuhn not used that one in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

There is consitency, but there is dynamic change and open interpretations, things aren't written into stone. Concepts are created by people, they do not exist without us and as we change our definitions change. Also it's not as if everyone is in agreement with the definitions of things. You should read some stuff by Sapir and Whorf.


I really suggest that you take some social anthropology courses, just so that you can get perspective.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

Do you know why, in the sciences, words are given precise definitions? It's so you don't have stupid arguments over what the definition of a word is when arguing some precise point. "c is a constant, and refers to the speed of light in a vacuum." What's a speed? What's light? What's a vacuum? All of these things have precise, constant, definitions, and that is not a bad thing.
Further to this, it is entirely sensible to say that, since this consistent framework exists, we should use it where at all possible. If I say something is travelling with constant speed, for example, you know I'm referring only to the scalar quantity, because I use the word "velocity" when I'm referring to the vector quantity, and the implication by omission is that I must therefore not be using crappy verbal shorthand.

If words have an obvious consistent, technical use, use it. It is not a valid counterargument to spout some conjecture of sociology that is blatently irrelvent to the discussion at hand.

The only way I can picture anyone saying this non-ironically is if I were sitting in someone's living room, with a long haired, stoned sixties throwback pronouncing it with vigor, and ending it with "maaaaaan".

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

Would a child calling his foster parents 'Mum' and 'Dad' piss you off too?

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

Oh, and in answer to your question:

I think that the reason it's called marriage is because gays have been fighting for the right to marry for ages, and now they've been given something that for all practical purposes is the same as a marriage. So they consider themselves to be married. I consider them to be married. I'm sure 'marriage' has a very well-defined legal meaning, but 'power' has a very well-defined meaning in physics, and I don't go off on one every time someone is described by a tabloid as 'powerful'.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

If you're talking to me, only if that statement was used to justify a comment about one child having more than two parents. And WRT your physics example, those are fairly obviously two different uses of the word "power", used in different arguments in different context. Noone tries to measure a politician's power in watts, and the debates are seperate.

[edit] WW righty ho

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

No, it was to the OP.

Basically, gay people are now able to have a union recognised legally, and if that means the same to them as marriage, why can't they consider themselves married?

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

Saying that 2 people can have a church wedding, exchange vows, and then have all the legal benefits of a married couple without actually 'being married' is bordering on incoherent. What actually is 'marriage' over and above these things?

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

I'm not convinced this makes sense. Saying that someone is literally, biologically "less of a man" than someone else is nonsensical. I've no idea what it would mean to 'fall somewhere in the middle' of being a man and a woman, other than perhaps being a hermaphrodite.

Pair bonding isnt marriage. The whole point of this thread is that civil unions arent technically marriages (whatever that means) so I doubt that rituals overseen by the tribal shaman in the Indomongolstanian rainforests will qualify either.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

A kind of continuum was found to exist in Drosophila, so, whilst his statement remains incorrect, there can be a literal meaning taken from saying something is "less male", although there are much better ways to get this information across.

Re: your edit, it's probably more accurate to refer to androgyny than hemaphrodity.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

I've not heard of that, but I'm guessing its because the number of features characterising each sex are sufficiently few in a 'simple' creature that talking about a continuum starts to make sense?

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

It's due to the way that sex is determined in them, and errors in meiosis. I'm not sure if it's an upshot of them being simpler, I'm not a geneticist. And I can't remember which lecture this example appeared in.

Re: Gay 'marriage'
 

well isn't it "defined" as "a union between a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others" in the little blurb that you have to say to the registrar? Sure this definition is arbitrary and could be redefined, but at the moment, that's what it is at the very least.